The outdoor cooking for large groups of people is extremely popular throughout the country, featuring the food specialties of geographic and ethnic groups. The grilling and barbequing of meats is well established and extensive and elaborate equipment is available for efficiently servicing groups of varying sizes. Other food categories are also popular, but equipment for the larger groups is extremely limited, primarily to labor intensive cleaning and cooking for seafood and vegetables.
While the meats are generally obtained in a prepared state ready for cooking without further preparation, seafood and vegetables are oftentimes personally furnished or directly obtained from the farmers or fishermen in their harvested uncleaned state. As such laborious individual cleaning of the food is required, particularly popular seafood such as oysters and shrimp. After cleaning a popular cooking method for the seafood and the vegetables is steam cooking. Because of the extensive manual handling and the need to transfer to separate cooking facilities, supplying the end product in a timely and consistent basis is difficult. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved efficient apparatus and method for the outdoor cleaning and cooking of these foodstuffs.